Tag Archives: bosses

She wasn’t mean to them or mistreated them–no far from it, she took care of those employees with only kindness and gentleness. After all, her momma always told her that a stressed cow provided sour milk. Now, Laurel didn’t know enough about farm life to know if that was actually true at all, but she understood the message. Her employees were her cows, and sour milk would not make her any kind of money. So—it only made sense to keep them happy.

But even as she didn’t feel guilty for this thought–she realized that it was not something that she absolutely could not tell anyone about. All it would take would be for one person to hear her express that opinion, or someone repeating her, to make for an absolute Human Resources and Public Relations nightmare. No matter how nicely she treated her employees–someone hearing that she thinks of them as cattle, and no one would believe that her employees were well treated–but instead that they all had some sort of Stockholm syndrome.

She comforted herself with the knowledge that even if it got out, the people who would be insulting her had no idea how to run a company or what was required to get a successful business off the ground in today’s economy. If you treated every employee like they were your best friend or your big sister–then every company would nose dive so far into the ground that the whole economy would be ruined.

That’s what Laurel believed, anyway. And her company was flourishing…so she was clearly doing something right. If that meant thinking about employees as cattle, she was gladly going to keep doing that—until everything started to go downhill, then she would revisit her theory.